Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis

Evolution

Still a Theory In Crisis

Evolution

Still a Theory in Crisis

MICHAEL DENTON

Seattle               Discovery Institute Press               2016

Description

More than thirty years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his earlier thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history of life. He argues that there remains an irresistible consilience of evidence for rejecting Darwinian cumulative selection as the major driving force of evolution. From the origin of life to the origin of human language, the great divisions in the natural order are still as profound as ever, and they are still unsupported by the series of adaptive transitional forms predicted by Darwin. In addition, Denton makes a provocative new argument about the pervasiveness of nonadaptive order throughout biology, order that cannot be explained by the Darwinian mechanism.

Copyright Notice

Copyright © 2016 by Discovery Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Publisher’s Note

This book is part of a series published by the Center for Science & Culture at Discovery Institute in Seattle. Previous books include Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell and Debating Darwin’s Doubt, edited by David Klinghoffer; The Myth of Junk DNA by Jonathan Wells; and Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life by Michael Flannery.

Library Cataloging Data

Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis

by Michael Denton

354 pages, 6 x 9 x 0.74 in. & 1 lb, 229 x 152 x 19 mm & 475 kg

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015960652

BISAC: SCI027000 SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution

BISAC: SCI008000 SCIENCE / Life Sciences/ Biology

BISAC: SCI034000 SCIENCE / History

ISBN-13: 978-1-936599-32-5 (paperback), 978-1-936599-33-2 (Kindle), 978-1-936599-34-9 (EPUB)

Publisher Information

Discovery Institute Press, 208 Columbia Street, Seattle, WA 98101

Internet: http://www.discoveryinstitutepress.org/

Published in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

First Edition: January 2016.

Praise for Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis

"Of all the books that have been critical of Darwinian evolution in recent years, Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis stands out for doing more than simply compiling the full range of evidence—from cosmology through all of biology to the origins of human language—that goes against a blind, incrementalist view of the development of life. To be sure, Denton does that very well. But the book’s real triumph is to frame this criticism in terms of an alternative paradigm, one indebted to Darwin’s great rival Richard Owen. This proposed new paradigm is founded on the idea of discrete biological forms, or ‘types,’ which have the standing of natural laws. Denton is consistently clear and scrupulous about how the evidence bears on neo-Darwinism vis-à-vis what might be called his ‘neo-Owenism.’ All told, Evolution is the one book that I would recommend to any student or lay person who wants to think in positive, scientific terms out of Darwin’s black box."

Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Professor of Social

Epistemology, University of Warwick, UK, and author

of Science vs. Religion? and Dissent over Descent

"Darwinists often deflect trenchant criticisms by kicking the can down the road. In ten or twenty years science will surely show their theory is correct, they say. Now thirty years after his groundbreaking book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton calls their bluff. Not only hasn’t Darwinism overcome its challenges, severe new problems have made the crisis much worse."

Michael Behe, PhD, Professor of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University, and author of Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution

Based on a great variety of indisputable facts from biology and paleontology, Michael Denton presents in his new book a highly competent and very thoughtful critique of the neo-Darwinian paradigm. His arguments convincingly suggest that modern biology prematurely dispensed with the notions of typology, essentialism, structuralism, and laws of biological form as promising alternative approaches to the origin of biological complexity and diversity. His affirmation of common descent with modification also demonstrates that well-founded doubts concerning the capabilities of the neo-Darwinian mechanism cannot be easily dismissed as anti-evolution propaganda, but should rather be welcomed even by neo-Darwinists as heuristically fruitful.

Günter Bechly, PhD, Paleontologist

"In this book Michael Denton moves adroitly from the history of ideas to scientific explanation. Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis is really two books in one: an insightful and fearless historical analysis on the one hand, and a provocative manifesto for a ‘new’ biology on the other. It is a rare and powerful combination that demands careful reading."

Michael A. Flannery, Professor and Assistant Dean for Special

and Historical Collections, University of Alabama at Birmingham,

and author of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life

Biologist Michael Denton has written a devastating critique of Darwinian evolution. Denton is not a creationist, but a structuralist. He makes a compelling argument, supported by abundant evidence, that the most basic structures of living things—their forms or body plans—are not adaptive and cannot be explained by the cumulative selection that is at the core of evolutionary theory. Instead, he argues, those forms are part of the very fabric of nature. Everyone involved in the controversies over evolution should read this book.

Jonathan Wells, PhD, Biologist and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute,

and author of Icons of Evolution and The Myth of Junk DNA

"Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis is a substantial reworking of his classic book of (nearly) the same name. In this new book, he expands his argument against Darwinian adaptation as a mechanism capable of explaining the patterns we see in life. Using his considerable knowledge of historical and modern biology, he makes a fresh and compelling argument about the origins of animal form that will be completely new to many readers. I urge anyone interested in these questions to read this book."

Ann Gauger, PhD, Senior Research Scientist, Biologic

Institute, and co-author of Science and Human Origins

Learn More about the Work of Michael Denton

You can access more information about Michael

Denton, reviews of his new book, and a series of video

conversations with him at the book’s website.

www.TheoryinCrisis.com

The Companion Documentaries

You can watch two companion video documentaries on this topic.

Privileged Species

Privileged Species is a documentary featuring Michael

Denton that explores growing evidence from physics,

chemistry, biology, and related fields that our universe was

designed for large multi-cellular beings like ourselves.

www.PrivilegedSpecies.com

The Biology of the Baroque

The Biology of the Baroque is a documentary featuring Michael

Denton that explores the mystery of non-adaptive order in nature,

order that cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution.

www.BiologyoftheBaroque.com

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Galápagos

3. The Hierarchy of Nature

4. Non-Adaptive Order

5. Evo-Devo

6. The Tree of Life and Distinctive Types

7. Bridging Gaps: Cells and Proteins

8. Bridging Gaps: Flowering Plants

9. Bridging Gaps: Limbs, Feathers, Wings, and Eels

10. Bridging Gaps: The Origin of Language

11. Beyond Chance: Natura Non Facit Saltum

12. Fossils: Long-Term Non-Adaptive Trends

13. Typology Redux

14. The Priority of the Paradigm

Endnotes

Chapter 1—Introduction

Chapter 2—Galápagos

Chapter 3—The Hierarchy of Nature

Chapter 4—Non-Adaptive Order

Chapter 5—Evo-Devo

Chapter 6—The Tree of Life and Distinctive Types

Chapter 7—Bridging Gaps: Cells and Proteins

Chapter 8—Bridging Gaps: Flowering Plants

Chapter 9—Bridging Gaps: Limbs, Feathers, Wings, and Eels

Chapter 10—Bridging Gaps: The Origin of Language

Chapter 11—Beyond Chance: Natura Non Facit Saltum

Chapter 12—Fossils: Long-Term Non-Adaptive Trends

Chapter 13—Typology Redux

Chapter 14—The Priority of the Paradigm

Illustration Credits

Index

1. Introduction

All in all, the empirical pattern of… nature conforms remarkably well to the typological model. The basic typological axioms—that classes are absolutely distinct, that classes possess unique diagnostic characters, that these diagnostic characteristics are present in fundamentally invariant form in all members of a class—apply almost universally throughout the entire realm of life.

Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), 117.

My main aim in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985) was to argue that nature is fundamentally discontinuous. As I pointed out, the major taxa-defining characteristics, such as hair in the case of mammals or feathers in the case of birds, are not led up to from putative ancestral forms via long series of functional intermediates (which I termed continuums of functional forms¹). Moreover, they have remained invariant in all of the very diverse members of the groups they define.² I argued that the absence of such functional continuums poses an existential threat to classical Darwinian adaptive gradualism and the claim that macroevolution is no more than an extension of microevolution. I defended vigorously the notion that factors beyond cumulative selection must have shaped the course of evolution. Altogether, Evolution was a full frontal critique of the standard Darwinian model. It implied that the natural system is a natural discontinuum rather than the functional continuum that Darwinian biologists claim.

I argued that the taxa are analogous to distinct geometric figures such as triangles or quadrilaterals, which cannot be approached via little successive steps from some other class of geometric figure.³ I thereby defended the typological view that the taxa or Types are ontologically real and distinct components of the world order, as was widely believed in the nineteenth century before Darwin. This was the view D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson defended in his classic On Growth and Form:

Nature proceeds from one type to another among organic as well as inorganic forms; and these types vary according to their own parameters, and are defined by physico-mathematical conditions of possibility. In natural history Cuvier’s types may not be perfectly chosen nor numerous enough, but types they are; and to seek for stepping-stones across the gaps between is to seek in vain, for ever.⁴

I still adhere to this discontinuous typological view, although since I wrote Evolution, I have adopted a much more structuralist conception of organic order and particularly of the Types. When I wrote Evolution, I was a convinced pan-adaptationist and held to a strictly functionalist view of biological systems. I saw adaptation as the major or sole organizing principle of life, and I regarded organisms as primarily adaptive bundles, analogous to machines like a watch, in which every feature is there to serve some specific adaptive end. I saw the Types primarily as a limited set of highly integrated functional wholes—Cuvierian Types as referred to in the above quotation—highly constrained for functional reasons, like a complex machine, against even slight degrees of evolutionary change.⁵

But I failed to see what is very obvious to me now, more than thirty years later, as a convinced structuralist: While Cuvierian functional constraints may well play a role in isolating the Types,⁶ not all features of living things are there to serve some adaptive purpose, and many of the taxa-defining novelties—such as the pentadactyl limb (Tetrapoda) or the concentric whorls of the flower (angiosperms)—give every appearance of being a-functional primal patterns which have never served any specific adaptive end. Such apparently non-adaptive forms pose, as Richard Owen showed in his landmark publication On the Nature of Limbs⁷ (ten years before Darwin’s Origin), a self-evident challenge to pan-adaptationism. Indeed, these apparently non-adaptive forms pose an existential threat to the whole Darwinian and functionalist paradigm, because they imply that causal factors other than cumulative selection to serve functional ends must have played a crucial role in shaping living systems.

At the outset, I need to define two terms I will use frequently throughout the rest of the book. One is the term homolog. As I use it, this term refers to a unique biological characteristic or trait shared by all the members of a particular group such as the pentadactyl ground plan of the tetrapod limb shared by all tetrapods. A homolog is therefore a taxa-defining novelty. The term homolog is used frequently by researchers in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) to describe such character traits.⁸ Systematists often describe homologs as synapomorphies or apomorphies⁹ In the nineteenth century, Richard Owen termed them primal patterns.¹⁰

The other word I need to define is non-adaptive, which I also employ throughout the book. I use this term to refer to any feature or characteristic of an organism which does not appear to serve any conceivable specific adaptive end—in other words, any feature that makes no contribution to the fitness of the organism. Such features are invisible to natural selection because natural selection only sees traits which serve some adaptive end. Examples might be the shape of a maple leaf (a non-adaptive feature restricted to an individual species of plant) or the pentadactyl limb (an example shared by many thousands of different vertebrate species).

My major goal in this new book is to review the challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy and the support for typology provided by the novelty and extraordinary invariance of the homologs. In addition, I will explore how the adaptive status of many homologs is clearly in doubt.

1.1 Structuralism and Functionalism

For two centuries, biologists have adhered to two opposing conceptions regarding the fundamental nature of organic form, one referred to as structuralism (or formalism) and the other as functionalism.¹¹ These two diametrically opposed conceptions of organic order were referred to by Stephen Jay Gould in his magisterial The Structure of Evolutionary Theory:

Most organisms are well adapted to their immediate environments [conditions of existence], but also built on anatomical ground plans that transcend any particular circumstance. Yet the two principles [functionalism or structuralism] seem opposed in a curious sense—for why should structures adapted for particular ends root their basic structure in homologies that do not now express any common function (as in Darwin’s example of mammalian forelimbs)?

The designation of one principle or the other as the causal foundation of biology virtually defines the position of any scientist towards the organic world and its causes of order... Shall we regard the plan of high-level taxonomic order as primary, with local adaptation viewed as a set of minor wrinkles… upon an abstract majesty? Or do local adaptations build the entire system from the bottom up? This dichotomy set the major debate of pre-Darwinian biology.¹²

a. Structuralism

According to the structuralist paradigm, a significant fraction of the order of life and of every organism is the result of basic internal constraints or causal factors that arise out of the fundamental physical properties of biological systems and biomatter. In other words, biological order that does not result from adaptation to satisfy functional ends. One of the simplest examples of this kind of order, structural order, is the cell membrane, which organizes itself into a thin layer covering the surface of the cell due entirely to the hydrophobic character of its lipid components—i.e., due to physical law—irrespective of any functional end it may serve.

These internal constraints, or laws of biological form as they were referred to in the nineteenth century,¹³ were believed by many biologists before Darwin to limit the way organisms are built to a few basic designs or Types, just as the laws of chemical form or crystal form limit chemicals and crystals to finite sets of lawful forms. This view implies that many of life’s basic forms arise in the same way as do other natural forms—ultimately from the self-organization of matter—and are genuine universals. Structuralism—at least in the form it took in the nineteenth century, and in the version I am defending here—implies that the basic Types of life, and indeed the whole evolutionary progression of life on earth, are built into nature. Thus, life is no artifact of time and chance, as it came to be seen after Darwin, but a predictable and necessary part of the cosmic whole.

Figure 1-1. Richard Owen. Drawn in 1850.

For Richard Owen, the father of Anglo-Saxon structuralism, the idea that life on earth is the result of a lawful natural process was explicitly affirmed in the concluding chapter of his Anatomy of Vertebrates, where he claimed that the path of evolution was preordained... due to innate capacity or power of change, by which nomogenously-created [generated by law] protozoa have risen to the higher forms of plants and animals.¹⁴ As E. S. Russell showed in his classic Form and Function, nearly every early nineteenth-century pre-Darwinian biologist—including such luminaries as Karl Ernst von Baer, Étienne Geoffroy, Isidore St. Hilaire, Henri Milne-Edwards, Étienne Serres, Johann Friedrich Meckel, Carl Gustave Carus, Heinrich Georg Bronn, and Theodore Schwann—believed life’s overall order to be the result of lawful, if unidentified, processes: the celebrated but elusive laws of form.¹⁵

As I commented in a previous article:

Given the lawful Zeitgeist of pre-Darwinian biology and given the enigmatic abstract nature of so many of the homologies and their invariance in so many diverse kinds of organisms through such vast periods of time it was a small inferential step to view them as changeless natural forms analogous to crystals or atoms. Geoffroy, perhaps the leading continental formalist, assumed the homologies to have powers analogous to atoms and other unalterable elements of the physical world… Owen also used the crystal analogy unambiguously in the final chapter of his Anatomy of Vertebrates, in the context of a discussion of the causes of segmentation: The repetition of similar segments in a vertebral column and of similar elements in a vertebral segment, is analogous to the repetition of similar crystals. The metaphor was also used by Theodore Schwann, the co-founder of the cell theory. In the last chapter of his Microscopical Researches he draws extensive parallels between cells and crystals:

The process of crystallization in inorganic nature… is… the nearest analogue to the formation of cells… Should we not then be justified in putting forward the proposition that the formation of the elementary parts of organisms is nothing but a crystallization… and the organism nothing but an aggregate of such crystals?… If a number of crystals capable of imbibition are formed, they must combine according to certain laws so as to form a systematic whole, similar to an organism.

The metaphor was used extensively by [Ernst] Haeckel who, echoing Schwann, talks of cells as organic crystals, of crystal trees, of the analogy between assimilation by the cell and the growth of crystals in a mother liquid.¹⁶

Consistent with the notion that the homologs or primal patterns are natural forms and genuine universals which should occur throughout the universe wherever there is life, Owen speculated in the closing section of Limbs about the possibility of the vertebrate homolog or Bauplan being actualized on other planets.¹⁷

Günter Wagner, in his recent book Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation, describes Owen’s structuralist view thus:

[Owen] thought that it should be possible to describe the organization of an animal body in the form of a body formula just like the composition of a chemical can be written in the form of a chemical formula. For example, H2SO4 is just a configuration of chemical elements (H, S and O) and their molecular proportions combined into a molecule (i.e., sulphuric acid).

For Owen, the analogues of chemical elements are the homologs in biology; that is, homologs are the anatomical atoms of the bodies that, in different combinations and configurations, make up the various specific bodies of actual animals.¹⁸

As I explained in my previously quoted article:

Structuralists adhere… to a strictly non-selectionist, non-historicist view of the biological world. Leading 20th-century structuralists include the inventor of the term ‘genetics,’ William Bateson, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, author of the classic structuralist work On Growth and Form, Rupert Riedl, Stuart Kauffman, Brian Goodman, and Stuart Newman.

Although Gould was, as he himself confesses, a convinced pan-selectionist in his early years, he was increasingly sympathetic to structuralism in his later years. In The Structure of Evolutionary Theory he writes: I don’t see how anyone could read, from Goethe and Geoffroy down through Severtzov, Remane and Riedl, without developing some appreciation for the plausibility, or at least the sheer intellectual power, of morphological explanations outside the domain of Darwinian functionalism.¹⁹

Of course, all structuralists accepted that organisms exhibited adaptations to serve external environmental conditions. But these were considered to be, as Owen described them, adaptive masks, grafted as it were onto underlying ground plans or primal patterns. Thus the great diversity of vertebrate limbs—fins for swimming, hands for grasping, wings for flying—are all modifications of the same underlying ground plan or primal pattern, which serves no particular environmental necessity. As Gould puts it in the quote cited earlier, they transcend any particular circumstance.

Owen saw the primal patterns to be generated during development by what he called the polarizing force, while the adaptive masks were the result of another fundamental mechanism he termed the adaptive force.²⁰ As I cautioned in an earlier paper:

It is important to stress that structuralism... implies that organic order is a mix of two completely different types of order, generated by two different causal mechanisms: a primal order… [including the taxa-defining homologs] generated by natural law, and a secondary adaptive order imposed by environmental constraints (by natural selection according to Darwinists, by Lamarckian mechanisms and by intelligent design according to current design theorists). The adaptive order of living things [which serves specific immediate environmental constraints] represents a completely different sort of order, outside of the explanatory framework of structuralism altogether. This means that structuralism per se can never give a complete causal explanation for all organic order. Structuralism is NOT a biological theory of everything.²¹

The origin of the natural laws that generate the primal order is, of course, its own important question. As I and others have argued elsewhere, those laws may point to the intelligent design of the universe as uniquely fit for life.²² But arguing that thesis is not the purpose of this book.

b. Functionalism

According to the opposing paradigm, often referred to as functionalism, the main or sole fundamental organizing principle of biology is adaptation. On this view, the main Type-defining homologs (pentadactyl limb, etc.) are adaptations built by cumulative selection during the course of evolution to serve various adaptive ends. Biological order built in this way is contingent in the sense that it is undetermined by natural law. Functionalists reject the structuralist notion that there is a significant amount of biological order that is the result of physical law, i.e., immanent in nature or arising from intrinsic constraints inherent in biological systems or the properties of biomatter. According to the functionalist view, organisms are, in essence, like machines, contingent assemblages of functional parts arranged to serve particular adaptive ends.²³ This is, of course, the currently prevailing and mainstream view. All Darwinists, and hence the great majority of evolutionary biologists, are functionalist by definition, as all evolution according to classical Darwinism comes about from cumulative selection to serve functional ends.

It is hard to imagine two scientific frameworks as diametrically opposed as structuralism and functionalism. Where functionalism suggests that function is prior and determines structure, structuralism suggests that structure is prior and constrains function. It is extraordinary to think that leading biologists have seen exactly the same empirical facts as pointing in such very different directions. As Russell stresses in Form and Function:

The contrast between the teleological attitude, with its insistence upon the priority of function to structure, and the morphological attitude, with its conviction of the priority of structure to function, is one of the most fundamental in biology.

Cuvier and Geoffroy are the greatest representatives of these opposing views. Which of them is right? Is there nothing more in the unity and diversity of organic forms than the results of functional adaptation, or is Geoffroy right in insisting upon an element of unity which cannot be explained in terms of adaptation?²⁴

Intriguingly, English natural theology from the seventeenth century²⁵ right up to the mid-nineteenth century also adhered strictly to an extreme form of pan-adaptationism, affirming that all the order of a living organism is adaptive and there to serve some immediate purpose—even male nipples, as John Ray claimed!²⁶ This is why the machine analogy famously associated with William Paley—organisms as watch-like purposeful assemblages of adaptive components—has been popular with creationists no less than with Darwinists.²⁷ Of course, creationists both before and after Darwin see adaptation as the result of the Divine watchmaker, while Darwin and subsequent Darwinists see it as the result of the blind watchmaker, cumulative selection.

The English-speaking world has adhered to some version of functionalism for so long (creationists since the seventeenth century and Darwinists since 1859) that it is inconceivable to most English-speaking biologists that living things might contain a significant degree of order arising from basic internal physical constraints rather than from adaptive processes. Consequently, there is no doubt that the structuralist claim—that the biological realm is undergirded by ground plans which serve no specific adaptive purpose—is alien to English-speaking biology.

1.2 The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis

Back in the mid-1980s, while I was preparing the final drafts of Evolution, the so-called modern synthesis or neo-Darwinian synthesis—a virulently functionalist worldview—was still the predominant paradigm among evolutionary biologists. The synthesis had arisen four to five decades earlier out of the work of a handful of key mid-century evolutionary biologists (geneticists Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, biologists Ernst Mayr and Julian Huxley, and paleontologist Gaylord Simpson), and it was aimed at providing an exclusively functionalist evolutionary framework.²⁸ The makers of the synthesis desired to show that all evolutionary change—not just at the microevolutionary level—could be accounted for by the cumulative selection of small adaptive changes. In other words, macroevolution is a mere extension of microevolution. By returning to a strictly functionalist and externalist evolutionary model, the makers of the synthesis hoped to banish, once and for all, non-Darwinian notions of causation from evolutionary biology.²⁹ Thus, all other interpretations of evolution were rendered anachronistic and suspect. These included the structuralist views of Richard Owen and many pre-Darwinian biologists,³⁰ the ideas of D’Arcy Thompson,³¹ orthogenetic³² and vitalist³³ notions, Lamarckian theories,³⁴ and other internalist notions which had been popular during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Consequently, the emphasis on adaptation from the 1950s to the 1970s and 1980s was even more emphatic than in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, especially the later editions where Darwin flirted with Lamarck.³⁵ As Gould pointed out,³⁶ the ethos of the times was unambiguously pan-adaptationist, and as he showed, textbooks following the 1959 Darwin centennial celebrations extolled the sufficiency of natural selection [cumulative selection] to craft the entire range of evolutionary phenomena at all scales, ecological to geological.³⁷ In one text, the authors argued that an organism is a mere bundle of interacting adaptations. Most all the features of all living things are adaptations.³⁸ Another author claimed: Natural selection… [is the] finger beckoning to the otherwise unguided heredity of an animal type. All other principles and facts of evolution may be satisfactorily related to it or explained by it, and the century following 1859 has seen Darwin triumphant.³⁹

However, the neo-Darwinian consensus was not without its detractors, and by 1985 there were some flies in the ointment. In addition to the celebrated and very widely read Gould and Lewontin spandrel paper criticizing the pan-adaptationist stance of the synthesis,⁴⁰ there was Gould’s later celebrated quip describing Darwinian explanations in many instances as no more than just so stories.⁴¹ (Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini echo this sentiment in their recent book What Darwin Got Wrong.⁴²) At the same time, Gould, working with Niles Eldredge, formulated the punctuational model, which highlighted the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, a fact captured by that other Gouldian quip that the absence of transitional forms was the trade secret of paleontology.⁴³ Gould, perhaps more than any other modern scholar, promoted the structuralist perspective in Structure of Evolutionary Theory by reviewing sympathetically the views of some of the leading nineteenth- and twentieth-century structuralists and criticizing the pan-adaptational stance.

Another straw in the wind was the controversy which erupted in the late 1970s and early 1980s over the radical cladism (often referred to as pattern cladism) of Colin Patterson and other researchers at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington in London. (Cladism is a method of classifying organisms by their shared novel features alone without regard to any evolutionary assumptions.) New brochures and displays explaining the new cladistic approach to systematics implied that the fossil record contained no direct ancestral species, but only sister species, a claim that conveyed the implicit message for all to see that the main taxa are distinct and not led up to by transitional forms.⁴⁴ Nature thundered against the cladist brochures and displays in a hysterical editorial entitled Darwin’s Death in South Kensington and pointedly cited a brochure that contained what the editorial referred to as weasel words, namely, if the theory of evolution is true.⁴⁵

Given the sorts of claim made by some of the more radical cladists at the time, it is easy to understand Nature’s concern! For example, Keith Thompson commented on pattern cladism: To the thesis of Darwinian evolution… has been added a new cladistics antithesis which says that the search for ancestors is a fool’s errand, that all we can do is determine sister group relationships of monophyletic taxa based on the analysis of derived characters.⁴⁶ For a scholarly review of the controversies raised by the so-called pattern cladists in London and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York during the 1980s and 90s, see Chapter 6 in David Williams and Malte Ebach’s Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography.⁴⁷

There also was the troubling view of the Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura,⁴⁸ who alluded to the growing evidence that much evolutionary change at the molecular level was neutral and had in many instances continued at a uniform rate. Kimura’s view was heresy at the time, when the conventional view was that the great majority of the bases in the genome were functional. His suggestion was seen to pose a major challenge to the pan-selectionism of the Synthesis and led to the so-called neutral theory of evolution.

Despite these other expressions of dissent, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis represented one of the very few publications in the 1980s to argue for the heretical possibility that nature might be fundamentally a discontinuum of isolated and unique Types unlinked by functional intermediates of the sort demanded by Darwinism. Few other publications attempted such a systematic critique of the whole Darwinian framework, and specifically of its core claim that cumulative selection is the sole or major engine of organic change and that all the order of nature and all evolutionary novelty can be accounted for by a simple extrapolation of microevolution to macroevolution.⁴⁹

Things are much changed today!

1.3 The Growing Critique

Since Evolution: A Theory in Crisis was published, there have been massive advances and discoveries in many areas of biology, including paleontology, genomics, and developmental biology. In 1985 the genome project was just launched, and researchers in developmental biology were just beginning to apply the new genetic knowledge to provide a detailed molecular genetic description of development. The new field of evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology) was just emerging, as were the first hints of a new epigenetic paradigm,⁵⁰ with the realization of the importance of self-organizational phenomena as a generator of emergent order beyond the genes, i.e., non-Darwinian order for free.⁵¹

During the subsequent three decades, these developments have transformed biology, and particularly evolutionary thought, leading to a growing and sustained critique of Darwinian pan-selectionism in many quarters that echoes some of the main themes of my earlier book. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that one of the major challenges confronting evolutionary biology today is explaining the origin of the novel homologs that define and at the same time isolate the taxa. The recognition that there are indeed taxa-defining novelties is an implicit acknowledgement that the gaps may be real, part of the natural order, and not sampling errors—the core axiom upon which the nineteenth-century doctrine of the Types was based.

In Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation (2014), Günter Wagner, a leading researcher in the field of evo-devo, makes his sympathies with pre-Darwinian notions of the Type obvious. Questioning the notion that the homologs are nominal kinds… simple arbitrary summaries of phenotypic structure and variation, Wagner asks whether they are instead natural kinds, a possibility which he describes as highly controversial.⁵² Controversial or not, the very use of the term natural kinds by a leading mainstream researcher interested in evolutionary causation is illustrative of just how far skepticism of classic Darwinism has gone in some quarters.

Richard Prum and Alan Brush, the researchers who elucidated the development of the feather, speak for many workers in the evo-devo field when they write:

Recently, Wagner and colleagues... proposed that research on the origin of evolutionary novelties should be distinct from research on standard microevolutionary change, and should be restructured to ask fundamentally different questions that focus directly on the mechanisms of the origin of qualitative innovations. This view underscores why the traditional neo-Darwinian approaches to the origin of feathers, as exemplified by Bock (1965) and Feduccia (1985, 1993, 1999), have failed. By emphasizing the reconstruction of a series of functionally and microevolutionarily plausible intermediate transitional states, neo-Darwinian approaches to the origin of feathers have failed to appropriately recognize the novel features of feather development and morphology, and have thus failed to adequately explain their origins. This failure reveals an inherent weakness of neo-Darwinian attempts to synthesize micro and macroevolution. In contrast, the developmental theory of the origin of feathers focuses directly on the explanation of the actual developmental novelties involved in the origin and diversification of feathers (Prum 1999). Restructuring the inquiry to focus directly on the explanation of the origin of the evolutionary novelties of feathers yields a conceptually more appropriate and productive approach.⁵³

In the same vein, Douglas Erwin entitled one of his papers Macro-evolution Is More than Repeated Rounds of Microevolution;⁵⁴ and in another paper, Erwin and colleague Eric Davidson argued that micro-evolutionary changes are not able to account for the origins of or enact radical changes to what they termed